Wednesday, November 25, 2015

Does welfare make you lazy? No.

"To some degree, this actually undersells cash programs. Two recent RCTs
have suggested that giving cash to poor people in the developing world
could actually, in some cases, encourage work. One paper by Christopher Blattman, Nathan Fiala, and Sebastian Martinez
evaluated a program that gave cash grants ($382 per person, on average)
to groups of young, unemployed Ugandans to help them learn skilled
trades, and found that hours of work rose by 17 percent, and earnings by
38 percent. Another paper,
by Blattman, Eric Green, Julian Jamison, and Jeannie Annan, looked at a
program in Nigeria that gave about $150 and some basic business skills
training to women in northern Uganda. Work hours increased by 61 percent."

There is no evidence that shows people on welfare don't want to work. Reagan's welfare queens were and are phoney.